Hands
by DeannaReadX
Summary: There's something about that, something in the way he reinforces his clasp, his decision, by holding on to her in particular. When Draco Malfoy has nothing left to lose, he takes Hermione Granger's hand, and he holds it. When Hermione Granger has nothing left to lose, Draco Malfoy takes her hand, and he holds it.


Harry is dead. Harry is dead. Harry is dead.

Its repeating over and over in her brain as though trying to drill itself into her mind, brand itself into her psyche so she could accept it and maintain some sort of dignity in the face of her enemies. She's not a sobbing blubbering mess on the floor though, so she rather thinks she's doing quite well.

She can hear voices, Voldemort's mostly, the same old mumbo jumbo, the propaganda, the fear, the hisses and the elegance of his words twisting in her gut so she has to physically restrain her ribs from allowing the nausea to take action, from allowing her to break because Jesus fucking Christ, Harry is dead.

And they're moving on and Neville's speech must have been meaningful because more tears are dripping down her dirt and sweat smudged cheeks, some of them landing on the deep split in her lip. She doesn't make a noise, she doesn't flinch at the stinging. Instead, she uses it to ground her, because that's when she realises Draco Malfoy is stood beside her. His position at her side is entirely by chance, she knows this, but she can't help but almost want to laugh at the irony of it. Is this really what has happened? What it has all come to.

It doesn't matter, in a moment – ah, yes, there it is, Lucius is stepping forward from the ranks of the opposite side and extending a hand to his son, and Voldemort is looking right at him, but he could be looking at Hermione, and surprisingly, she doesn't even feel a tiny flicker of fear. All she feels is an intense burning fury boiling in her body, running through her veins. Her jaw is tense and her eyes are open full, looser than everything else, simply tired and lost, only for a moment; she has to just allow herself this one moment of pain. In a minute, she will need to draw on that pain, convert it to emotions that will fuel her strength, emotions no girl of eighteen should ever have to feel.

She's waiting, numbly, for Draco to take that step forward like she's expecting him to, to leave them, and take his rightful place in enemy surroundings. But he doesn't. He doesn't move a muscle and she can feel eyes on her, or rather him, from all around the crumbling, singed courtyard, all anticipating the moment, watching it unfurl.

He doesn't move at all, not until suddenly, fingers brush against the tips of her own and its so light, so real, that her eyes really do flicker then, her jaw loses its hardness, and slowly but not hesitantly, fingers thread through her own, and a palm presses against hers. Its warm, roughed slightly by the exhaustion of the night, probably covered in dirt and mud. She knows her own hand is. Its bleeding actually, her knuckles are cut from repeatedly slamming them into the faces of deatheaters, and from tripping over rubble; and red blood is drying on her skin. But he doesn't seem – yes, he doesn't seem to care. Two years previous, he would have cursed her hand off for forcing him into such close proximity with her 'mud blood', but now... now he is squeezing tighter, a death grip even.

It takes her a few seconds, but she lifts her chin, holds her head high and strong, swallows the lump in her throat, and squeezes back, one nod being all her side needs to know that they can trust Malfoy, that he is one of them now, always has been really. It has just taken him a while to gather the courage. Whatever, she thinks, the guy has nothing left to lose.

There's something about that, something in the way he reinforces his clasp, his decision, by holding on to her in particular. When Draco Malfoy has nothing left to lose, he takes Hermione Granger's hand, and he holds it.

They don't have much time of course, their hands can only be interlocked for so long before the battle recommences and the school is once again filled with the sounds of screams and crackling of spells and the thuds of bodies hitting the floor.

She thinks once he's let go of her that he's going to run, but he doesn't, he simply twists his grip into one more practical for moving with, and pulls her out of the way of a curse shooting right towards her head. After that she's throwing spells at all deatheaters she can see in a split second, killing as she runs, being moved forward by Draco who also seems to have given up hesitancy. Its a game of kill, or be killed.

And Hermione does not plan on dying tonight.

She wants to get to Harry when he reveals himself again, unable to truly tackle the immense relief washing over her like a bucket of warm water, or the anger she feels at Voldemort for doing this to them, to everyone. But she's being restrained, a tight arm around her waist from behind as she struggles for release, to be let go so she can rip at Voldemort, tear at his skin, cause him all the pain he has caused the world.

But the arm is surprisingly strong and toned for someone as thin and undernourished as Malfoy, and she can't break it's hold. She only freezes when the other arm joins it, pulling her back amongst the renewed crowd of terrified, shocked and battered onlookers.

"Granger, Potter _has _to do it, it can't he anyone else, it _has_ to be Potter, and you _know_ it," Malfoy's firm, yet slightly comforting voice says solidly against her ear, and she goes slightly limp against him, her hand weakly tapping over his own across her stomach, indicating that his restraint is no longer necessary. She knows this is it. This is the moment they've been building up to for years, fighting for, dying for, crying for. She feels it in her bones, in her breath, in her heart. Its a heady thing, absolutely petrifying. There are only two ways it can go, and the possibility of it not being the one she needs is completely shattering. She cannot stand and watch the deatheaters flanked around the dead body of her best friend again, she just can't.

Her breathing is unlevel, shaky and shallow as she tries to get a hold on herself. Her hand numbly acts of its own accord, tightening itself around her wand, clamped down enough to draw blood. She needs something more than that though. She needs a – a contact. Human contact, something to keep her in place so she doesn't crumple to her knees. Her body leans back, just a millimetre, to where she knows Draco's torso will support her, where she knows the thrumming of another heartbeat against her shoulder blade will ground her.

She closes her eyes, just for a second, to take it in. These people around her, backed against the wall on all sides of the hall in which she had first fallen in love with the school, where she had first laid eyes on Harry and Ron, and where, for eight years, she had spent time in, talked to her friends, even sat on the windowsills to study out of the way. This hall, it holds so much feeling, so many memories, she can hardly believe that she is stood here, three broken ribs, a broken right arm, amongst people with similar, if not worse injuries; her comrades, friends, brothers and sisters in arms. The people she had grown up with, and their parents, all waiting for this final part, this climax that will either shatter the world, or give them the basis to rebuild it again.

When she opens her eyes again, Voldemort's body is laid on the floor, unceremoniously, incredibly human. Nothing but a sack of mutated bones and blood. And Harry is stood above him, wand still clutched tightly at his side, head slightly bowed, glasses glinting in the light of the several small fires dotted around them. The night's cold is sneaking into the castle, the wind blowing in through the giant gaps in the ceilings, and the open double doors to the entrance hall. Slowly, it is sinking in; slowly, people begin to unfreeze, and a gentle murmur grows softly amongst the remaining. Then people are restraining left over deatheaters before they can flee. People are laughing, embracing each other, crying with an almost catatonic relief.

Its over. The words might have been spoken in her ear, or maybe she says them out loud, chokes them with her whole world slotting back into place around her, tattered, blackened, damaged, but there all the same.

One of her hands move to her mouth and then a smile breaks out suddenly across her sore, bleeding lips, the other one clutching Malfoy's again, her eyes filling with hot, heavy tears, rushing straight from her chest to her tear ducts. She lets out a gasp as it finally hits her and she realises that its real, she's not hallucinating, it really is over, and Harry isn't dead, and Malfoy is defected and he's stood behind her, not leaving, and – Merlin, she may actually be able to get it all back; the ambition, the grades, the books, the safe feeling of being somewhere she knows no one can hurt her.

Its too much for her to not rush forward, dragging Malfoy forward with her a few steps before she lets go of his hand again and runs full speed towards Harry, hair blowing behind her, wind stinging her cuts as she throws her arms around him, burying her head in his neck, smelling him, memorising him, just feeling his warmth against her, the contours of his shoulders and chest and those arms wrapping around her waist again, lifting her that little bit more and returning the notion with equal fervour. Then Ron is there and all three of them are clutching each other like they may actually turn to dust at any moment, and she can't help crying because for a moment, she truly never thought she would be able to hug both her boys again, that she would never be able to be this close to them again.

But she is, she's hugging them and she's half-sobbing, half-laughing. Especially when they both lift her and twirl her around once. She breaks free, eventually, pressing and peppering kisses to both of their faces, still laughing and crying at the same time. Its impossible, she thinks, to have been given a greater gift than this, the pure elation of having them both in her arms once more. To see both their big dumb faces laughing at her once last time.

She has years of this, of looking at them, animated, alive, smiling.

Then she turns, remembering Draco. He's right where she left him, but instead he's perched on a step nearby, silently, broodingly helping a fifth year hufflepuff wrap a very inflamed burn. He's not saying anything, and his expression is blank, but his fingers, she knows, are gentle and work with precision and care that he doesn't feature on his face, or in his words. For the moment, that is something quite spectacular, because so much has happened, and so much is broken, but he's helping, and he's healing. That's enough, for now.

* * *

"You look tired," she says, as she sits down beside him on the long ledge spacing out seemingly infinite towards the horizon, dangling her legs off the side and looking down at the five hundred foot dip full of dust and rubble and probably a couple of bodies or body parts.

"What an intelligent observation Granger, your ability to point out the absolute obvious and inevitable continues to astound me," he drawls, but doesn't move away from her, or make a snide comment about how her arm is pressing comfortably against his, or her leg doing the same thing. The remark doesn't carry the usual amount of clarity though, the syllables are ever so slightly slurred, and its quieter, less proud. She knows the sarcasm is out of habit than anything else.

She looks sideways at him, seeing as he seems to be feeling too exhausted to really snap at her, and realises that he's really quite beautiful. Not in the way women are of course, but he has a... damaged look of insolence to him. His skin is dirty, but almost creamy looking in the sun, and his hair is a lot less pale with all the trials of battle. He's very, very thin, she realises, and his ripped suit is hanging off him a little, his chin pointier than ever, nose chiselled and in annoyingly perfect proportion to the rest of his face. He's squinting his eyes out ahead of him, but they're crystal blue and breathtaking as ever, and she sees it now; a slight personality change. You see the weakness, the humanity in someone you hate, and suddenly its not so hard to see them as... well, yes, something beautiful.

The creases of his face are lines of fear and sadness and probably a minor mental illness – but then again, they will all have minor mental illnesses after today.

"So shouldn't you sleep?" she asks, allowing her shoulders to slump a little like his, one finger running over the bruises across her knuckles and palm.

"Shouldn't _you _sleep?" he rebukes, and she can't think of a reply, so she simply doesn't say anything. For a while, they sit in silence, simply thinking to themselves, privately, trying to gain some order or control of mind, to find a sense of peace in their heads that would make everything a lot less painful.

"Your father was looking for you, I sent him down to the lake; I didn't think you'd want to talk to any of them at the moment," she says, drawing full circle back to the recent happenings, and drawing in a deep, satisfying breath of fresh Oxygen.

"Thank you," he says once, stoically, not looking at her and bowing his head slightly. She has to get a hold of herself because she nearly has a heart attack. She can't quite believe that she has just heard those words come out of Draco Malfoy's mouth, directed at her.

There's another bout of quiet before he licks his lips to wet them, and glances sideways at her "you know why I did what I did this afternoon, don't you Granger?" he says solidly, demanding that she reply.

"Because you were about to die," she says. He nods, but gestures for her to elaborate "and you wanted to die knowing that you had at least done one thing right, eventually. You wanted to die and be able to say that you finally had the courage to fight back," she deduces finally and with a slight solemn edge to her tone. This time its her keeping her head facing forward ahead of her, and Malfoy watching, trying to gage her reactions.

"Yes, but no," he says, tilting his head back and forth as if to weigh up the truth of both his replies "I wanted to do the right thing, but I owed you a debt. I let that monstrosity happen to you on the floor of my drawing room, and I stood back and watched and I didn't do anything. I had to make that right-"

"But you weren't the one hurting me Draco-"

"I was there, and I didn't do anything about it, and that is just as bad, and I am just as much to blame. Bella wasn't going to make an attempt to make it right with you, serve penance, earn your forgiveness. She feelt no remorse. So someone should, someone should be responsible for that, and it seems... well, apparently Granger, and I can't believe I'm saying this right now, I'm the only one that is willing to do that. I... I don't like you, I don't think I ever will.

But I do know you didn't deserve that, you don't deserve half the terrible things that you've had to deal with, and so if – I don't want to talk to you or see you regularly or anything. But if you ever need anything, if you ever need something that you can't ask anyone else for, you just need to call on me, and I'll get it for you," he finishes, nodding once, and awkwardly. She wants to say something, to try and tell him that he doesn't need to offer that, that he doesn't owe her anything. But he does. He owes her after several years of bullying and torment and wrong choices and cowardly bystanding all the torture she endured. Draco Malfoy owes her a lot. And if there's one thing she hates, is having someone indebted to her.

So as he breathes out a soft sigh, lifts a hand to press against the cradle of her skull, and lets his thumb remain there, over the messy plat of her hair for a moment, before he drops the hand, pushes back up to full height with his hands, and walks back along the bridge towards the castle. She turns her head, and watches him, his body against the golden light of the morning sun, the limping of his most likely broken leg as he walks away from her, the hunching of his diaphragm where one of his ribs are either badly bruised, or in need of setting.

He looks broken. But its the... the kind of broken that can be fixed, with time, and redemption, and he has his whole life ahead of him, as does she. And, considering everything they have been through, and at such a young age, she has hope for the first time in about five hours, she has hope that they will be able to make it through this, and that one day, he will be as amazing as he was always meant to be.

* * *

She sniffs, but she doesn't feel it because her nose is numb. The only way she can really feel her tears is because they are so hot against the cold skin of her prominent cheekbones. She wonders then, why her? Hadn't she sacrificed enough? Hadn't she given up enough of herself? Surely she deserved more than this, more than standing over a tiny headstone in the midst of the coldest winter in years, crying silently, but unable to really sob.

And maybe she is falling apart on the inside, maybe it hurts and it physically aches in her gut; maybe there's an emptiness in her body that has never been quite so shattering and exhausting, but she's used to feeling pain, and she's used to putting herself back together even when she's scattered across the ground like a million pieces of gleaming, sharp glass. Pain is not a new thing for her.

This is an obstacle, she thinks. She tries to treat the entire situation as a hurdle, something she can get over, use to make her stronger. But this time its different. This time its personal, internal; an actual individual piece of her has been torn away from her existence, and she has absolutely no idea how to fill that hollow space. She tries to swallow back the lump in her throat, she really does; but it racks her body with shivers and it manifests in the depths of her soul and she isn't prepared for this, she has never read any books on how to deal with the death of her unborn child.

Three months. She had been three months pregnant when the bleeding had started. She had called Harry, sobbing terrified down the phone that she needed to go to St Mungos. He had apparated straight to her, and then taken her immediately to her doctor. She remembers being laid there in bed, hoping and praying with every inch of her body that it was a false alarm, that the bleeding was just a slight hiccup, and that it could be stopped. But it had been too late, the foetus had been dead inside her, but that afternoon she had been crippled by pelvic pain, and that was when her doctor had stood at the foot of her bed with Harry gripping her hand, and explained that she'd had a miscarriage.

She can't understand it, she's done everything right. She doesn't smoke, the moment she set eyes on the positive pregnancy test, she had stopped drinking – not that she was really a big drinker in the first place of course. She ate well, slept well, exercised and rested well. She even had a maternity leave booked for the sixth month of the pregnancy onwards. Okay, so maybe the situation with the child's father was a little messy, and they had broken up a couple of weeks after knowing of the babies existence; but that couldn't – no, its impossible for that kind of situation to affect the health of a growing foetus, surely.

Her doctor has explained to her a thousand times that occasionally, these things just happen. Women lose their babies all the time, and it just can't be helped. So many people are trying to convince her that its not her fault, that she hasn't done anything wrong, that its just a horrible feature of nature. But she can't believe them, not truly. Who elses fault could it be? There was no one else to blame.

She hadn't planned the pregnancy, she never wanted children, not really; but from the moment she had learned that there was a potential human life growing inside her, she had loved it with her entire world with immediate effect. And that had been ripped from her in nothing but a bit of blood and some abdominal pain.

Her head hurts, her ribs hurts, her eyelids are sore, rubbed and cried raw and sensitive into the long hours of the night. She just can't be fucked with vanity lately; make up and hair, clothes, its all foreign and irrelevant to her all of a sudden because for no reason, she would never be able to meet her baby, ever.

Its snowing again, a blanket of white surrounds her, covering half the gravestones and blending with the garish, slightly blinding colour of the daytime sky. It doesn't change very much, the whole of London looks like this every day this current winter. There's no green in Hyde Park, even the leaves have dropped from their branches and been hidden beneath the snow. She normally loves all this; the smell of the cold, seeing her breath in the air, standing with her ankles cushioned by white, scarves padding her neck and gloves cuddling her fingers. She normally adores Christmas.

But her ex-boyfriend and the father of the baby is staying with his family to grieve, and Ron is in Thailand and Harry is spending it with Ginny and baby James.

So this year Hermione will be sat curled in on herself on her couch with nothing but the crackling of the fire and several bottles of red wine for company. Its as though losing this child, this barely grown thing that had died inside her, has pulled the plug on all connections she felt with others. They try to help, to be there for her and comfort her; but none of them get it, none of them truly understand.

So she stands here now, on Christmas Eve, with her breath visibly twirling into tiny whisps in the air, tears rolling down her face, body wrapped in a thick tweed winter coat, staring down at the name carved into the stone in front of her: '_Aiyana Granger_'

"Aiyana; Forever flowering. Native American name, right?" a voice she vaguely recognised cut through the self-created fog around her and she blinked a couple of times, glancing briefly sideways without moving her head. She sniffed again, swallowed, and nodded, wetting her dry, cracked lips.

"Appropriate," the voice said again, and she nodded once more, her breathing still quivery and laboured in her aching lungs, snow falling softly and landing in the crazy curls of her hair, catching on it.

There was silence then. For around half an hour, neither of them moved, neither of them talked. The only sounds were that of the birds in the trees and their bodies respiring as they continued to stare at the headstone. Nothing but the name of course, no body to bury, no casket to order, or funeral to arrange. That would have been worse, she thinks, having to watch that tiny wooden box being lowered into the ground. And that's when she thinks – as that's all she can really do with her time at the moment – she has it easy compared to those other mothers. The ones that have to give birth to small, lifeless forms, the ones that wait desperately for the sound of that crying, the wail that tells them their world isn't about to be smashed apart.

She can't feel her toes or her fingers, and very little of the rest of her body, and this is comfort; any form of numbness is welcome, a sort of warmth in her mind that makes her feel, just for a moment, like she's flying.

Then, without warning or hesitation, a familiar hand slips into her own and grasps tightly through the wool of her gloves and its as though a flow of real, true warmth spreads through her from this one strong hand, this grip that is firm, but unharsh and solid. For the first time in months she feels present in her own body, grounded by her own feet, real and _there_ in her legs and shaky knees.

Suddenly, with a sharp intake of breath, she is taken back, just for a moment, to the 2nd May 1998 when he had gripped her hand in the midst of loss and destruction with the entirety of his family and an army of deatheaters in full vision. She was taken back to that morning, sat on the bridge beside him and her thoughts as he walked away. _The kind of broken that can be fixed_. She hopes then, she hopes with everything that she is, that she is the kind of broken that can be fixed, that she can stand here year after year and slowly be able to breathe properly.

She hopes, that Christmas by Christmas, the name on the headstone won't hurt as much, that she will cry a little less and smile a little more. She hopes that when and if she does ever have any other children, they too will be able to take a hold of her hand, grip it tight, and be her realisation; the realisation that without noticing, without seeing it, she had been fixed.

Funny thing really, how such a small insignificant every day thing can be so vivid in her mind when applied to that particular palm, those particular fingers, that particular person who had, at a time of pain and grief and unimaginable conflict, gripped onto her own and solidified her, made everything just... that little bit better, just a little bit more possible. When Hermione Granger has nothing left to lose, Draco Malfoy takes her hand, and he holds it.

She almost chuckles at it. Weird things.

Hands.


End file.
